156b: "For the perceptions we have such names as sight, hearing, smelling, feeling cold and feeling hot [oops: someone forgot taste!]; also what are called pleasures and pains, desires and fears"
I'm curious about what pleasure, pain, desire, and fear are doing here under the category of perception. This is neither an obvious classification, nor is it obviously Platonic doctrine (I'm thinking of pleasures and pains of anticipation in the Philebus, the pleasures of reason in Republic, and desire and fear as motivational states in Republic as well). So: why group these items together here?
One option is that the specific instances of these phenomena that Plato has in mind are perception-dependent states in one way or another: some desires and fears might have a perceptual component or a perceptual source, and some pleasures and pains could be very closely associated with certain perceptual experiences (say, the taste of chocolate). But then why not include other perception-dependent states as well, like perceptual beliefs whose content is derived from actual experiences? Or is some other criterion of "perception" or "perceptible" at work in creating the list?
Another problem is that, at least at this stage, it is not even clear that all of these items are truth-apt in the same way. If desires and fears, for instance, cannot be evaluated as true or false, we might rightly wonder: What are Plato's grounds for grouping them together with sense-perceptions in a dialogue about epistemology? Given the context, it seems especially strange to include these items in the claim that knowledge is perception.
Happy reading!
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